Street Fighter III Wasn’t Meant to Be a Street Fighter Title

When you look at a franchise that has been around for a while, you often think that the development of each game was a known process and that the team only struggled when it came to making each game feel special. Knowing with to insert new characters and mechanics to make things pop can’t be easy. But if you actually look at the history of gaming, you’ll notice that a lot of key titles or franchises didn’t end the way they started out. Now, we can add Street Fighter III to that list.

This comes not from Capcom, but from one of its former developers in Akiman. He worked on the second SF title, and apparently, after that game’s major success, Capcom asked him to divide up the teams so that they could make even more titles of that nature. They wanted to make different fighting games not named Street Fighter. Ironic, but it’s true.

As Akiman explained, the game he worked on after the split-up wasn’t meant to be an SF title, but because it looked like it, it was eventually converted into Street Fighter III. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it–the game had a lot of new characters, including the main antagonist of the game, Gill.

A lot of people even questioned at the time why Capcom wasn’t making the jump to 3D like many others were at the time– the game was released in 1997 when the N64 and PS1 were making waves in the 3D market. Despite that, the game did well in arcades and on consoles and even had two different subsequent releases to help make the game land even more. Many gamers have even noted after hearing this story that it “feels right” due to how the game honestly played and felt different from the legendary Street Fighter II.

This is hardly the first time a game looked like another title, thus creating a kind of fusion. One of the most famous/infamous examples was that of Dinosaur Planet. This was being made for the Nintendo Gamecube under the eye of legendary developer Shigeru Miyamoto. When he came in to check on it one day, he noticed that the main character looked like Fox McCloud and basically asked the team to make the title a Star Fox game. Thus, Star Fox Adventures was born.

Sometimes things don’t start out as part of a franchise, but then things change and key additions are made. Live and learn, everyone!

Source: Twitter